Women in Technology

Article:		The PHP Scalability Myth
Subject:		Java People - can u guys buy a clue?
Date:		2003-10-17 10:11:56
From:		anonymous2
Ok - fine, maybe 5% of web applications require the features of J2EE. Go ahead and build your site with that. If you don't need those features, why not buy 10 commodity linux boxes (a la Google), build your web app in PHP and throw a monster load balancer in front of them? I think it was Joel Spolsky who was describing the main two kinds of programmers he comes across: 1) The kind who love really obscure, theoretical CS problems. They'll spend a week working on some super neat-o solution to a binary crypto algorithm <or whatever>. These kinds of people love Java. It gets them all hot for some reason. 2) The kind who are interested in solving real problems, and doing it quickly and efficiently. They'd rather write 5 lines of PH code to get a job done, instead of 25 lines of Java to do the same thing. Who cares if it doesn't look as good on the resume? There's this obsession with Java in big IT departments now as if it's some kind of holy grail. All of the "breakthrough" sites like Yahoo, eBay, etc. were built in 2 weeks in some kids garage. Trust me, the next ones are going to be built the same way & it's not going to be with Java/J2EE sitting on $100k hardware.

Showing messages 1 through 6 of 6.

• Java People - can u guys buy a clue?
  2003-11-03 11:38:15  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  I agree with you. My 30 years involvement in the corperate environment seems to be to always choose the software product that's the most complex such as .NET, JAVA/JSP to create job security. If things are easy and cheap, we must be doing them wrong.
  
  But if you want a highly productive programming staff and willing to think outside of the box. Our choices would be much different.
  
  Oh, and by the way.... I'm a corporate web developer in a JAVA/JSP shop because that's what our management chose. But when I want to be productive, I code in PHP.

• Java People - can u guys buy a clue?
  2003-10-20 15:04:02  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  What technology are those sites using now? Java or .Net but it is scalable for the enterprise

• Java People - can u guys buy a clue?
  2003-10-17 15:47:14  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  Ok, but why should I buy 10 linux boxes to run PHP? Why not buy 10 linux boxes and run J2EE? Booth are free and if you "only" need the features of PHP, write it all in JSP in the J2EE server.

• Java People - can u guys buy a clue?
  2003-10-17 12:37:30  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  Gee, how many well-publicized failures and outages has eBay had over the past few years? Most due to "system upgrades"? Anything written in somebody's garage in two weeks will not be performant, scalable, well-architected, or maintainable (yes, Virginia, there is a difference between all of these terms, though the poster and the article author don't seem to understand this), no matter what the language.

• Java People - can u guys buy a clue?
  2003-10-17 11:56:30  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  hmmm...consider then that the "breakthrough" site eBay is re-architecting to J2EE for scalability and maintainability.
• Java People - can u guys buy a clue?
  2003-11-17 16:34:23  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  you are all rookies. you are all aguing about CPU cycles (someone mentioned C). CPU cycles is not the goal in scalability. is an opitimised assembler app serving a fictitious figure of 1000 pages at once scalable? no, because how do you then serve 2000?
  
  assume slow technology A cans server 100 pages at once. assume faster technology B servers 200 pages at once. A is given more overhead so that it can serve 50 pages simulaneously on seperate servers. A is run on 10 servers, thus serving 50 * 10 = 500 pages at once. A is more scalable than B.